Friday, May 13, 2016

Did Cruz pirate campaign music?

Audiosocket is a music licensing company based in Seattle. Among its clients are Sarah Schachner, who wrote, "Lens," and Brad Couture, who wrote, “Fear of Complacency.”

The company sued Cruz and his campaign ad maker, Madison McQueen, claiming they pilfered these songs without permission, as if the songs were Trump delegates. The msuic was used as background music.
Now, anyone can sue anyone for anything in America these days, or so it seems.

In a call to GeekWire on Wednesday, Audiosocket CEO Brent McCrossen said that intellectual property and copyright violation is “rampant.” He credits Lidcore and its LicenseID product, which were spun out of Audiosocket in January, with catching Cruz and many others.

“There’s not really any effective technology that can track individual licensed and unlicensed usage and help rights holders recapture that,” McCrossen said. “There’s not enough transparency, especially on the internet, and this [LicenseID] technology works, tremendously well. Rights holders are going to benefit from it and obviously Audiosocket is in this case.”

LicenseID enables the identification and monitoring of intellectual property along with its associated data. The technology uses watermarking to encode data into media each time it is uploaded or downloaded for licensing and distribution. McCrossen said it was invented within his company at the end of 2014 because, he said, people were stealing their stuff.

“It wasn’t like a wedding videographer who should be buying a $35 wedding video license buying a personal license,” McCrossen said. “It was massive corporations downloading songs without licensing at all or buying a $2 personal license and putting it into huge brand campaigns.”

Trump apparently obtained the rights to Rolling Stones material and other tunes for his campaign rallies.

The GOP should threaten to defund anti-piracy enforcement at the federal level.

That would bring an almost immediate end to the entire left-wing media/sports/entertainment complex as piracy-friendly countries suck all of the value out of their properties and make 99-percenters of these anti-American pieces of filth.